Historical memory is a potent weapon in fighting against the desert of organized forgetting and implies a rethinking of the role that artists, intellectuals, educators, youth and other concerned citizens can play in fostering a reawakening of America's battered public memories.

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

When you look at the Koch brothers, who make three million dollars an hour on their dividends alone, you begin to get a sense of what we're talking about. The estimates now are that the upper 1% control something like 40% of all wealth. Eighty families in the world control as much as half the world's population. These figures are being produced every day. We need to put a human face to these figures. We need to make clear that something is being taken from the vast majority of people, and is causing an enormous amount of suffering.

I mean, think of Flint. I mean, think of the lead poisoning of thousands of poor and black children across the United States.

A discourse for broad-based political change is crucial for developing a politics that speaks to a future that can provide sustainable jobs, decent health care, quality education and communities of solidarity and support for young people.

America is at war with itself because it's basically declared war not only on any sense of democratic idealism, but it's declared war on all the institutions that make democracy possible. And we see it with the war on public schools. We see it with the war on education. We see it with the war on the healthcare system.

Under a neoliberal regime, the language of authority, power and command is divorced from ethics, social responsibility, critical analysis and social costs.